not a creature was stirring,

As you may or may not know, pork is unclean for Muslims and categorically forbidden not only to eat, but even to be around. You cannot get pork in the marketplace not because no one will buy it (there are a surprising number of Christians around), but because it cannot even be around anyone else’s food. When you live in a country that is 90% Muslim, you end up having to go without such deliciousness.

The holidays having just passed; I can happily report that to well behaved boys and girls in such a predicament Santa Claus brings sausages, sweet delicious sausages. Truly, what awaited me on Christmas morning was a stocking (disguised as a shopping bag) filled with sausages—salami, sopressata, et al. After all if there is something that the big guy can get behind it is checking those pesky, killjoy Muslims. And nitrates.

However, just because I had the polar seal of approval, does not mean that I was not sweating my return to Indonesia. Customs, especially in Jakarta, have been known to be pretty whimsical with their ‘mission,’ often with foreigners like myself. From the people who so haphazardly enforce religious mores—confiscating the ‘Lolita’ DVD while suitcases packed with liquor bottles sail through—you should expect anything. They would have had to break out the gloves to confiscate my sausages, but the border is not really the place to win too many arguments.
With a suitcase full of pork products and foreign literature (also a no-no at times), I strolled up to the border, sweating things a bit. What I did not realize was that New Year’s Eve is so festive for Indonesian customs officers. Trying to put my bag into their x-ray machine, this jovial band of mustachioed men, all sporting the traditional developing country navy blue sweater outfit, was simply not having it.

Their chief duties seemed to largely involve slapping everyone on the back while saying ‘Bagus! Bagus!’ (Goulet-ian even in translation: ‘Good! Good!’), apparently with friends like these petty worries like security are secondary. As my bag threatened to disappear into the bowels of the x-ray machine one of the officers literally reached into the machine (you would think if you worked with x-rays, like, professionally, you would be a bit more cognizant of their properties) to pull my bag back out and jauntily carry it around the machine for me. Not a single bag was being scanned.

I can only imagine what was really going on at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport that night, but clearly these guys did not want anything to do with it. In a country as corrupt as Indonesia (they recently improved to number 2 in Transparency International’s yearly report), people usually shrug off corruption with a sort of ‘hey! Last I checked we were all human beings, right? Can anyone really help it?’ guffaw. That all these men were smiling, back-slapping, and giggling nervously is never a good sign. My sausages and I did not stick around to ask too many questions. Maybe that is just what was going on because, after all, everyone deserves the chance to start off better, even just nominally, in the New Year.